Joel Morris (aka JMX), a British YouTuber and co-founder of YouTuber academy Xcademy and influencer token economy Xcad Network, claims to have stepped down from the latter after selling large quantities of his own token.
He was also implicated in the Save the Kids crypto scam, which saw big UK YouTubers and other influencers from the likes of FaZe Clan encourage their followers to buy the token, before dumping big amounts of it. This meant they made money from it while crashing the price, leaving many who bought in with a worthless crypto.
Joel was one of the YouTubers accused by Coffeezilla of pumping and dumping the token, but denies direct involvement in this (more on that below). He was also accused of selling over half of his $XCAD token.
He has now responded with a statement and claims to have stepped down from his position as co-founder of Xcad.
Despite these claims, Joel is still listed as a founder on the xcadnetwork.com website and, a few years after the publication of this article, tweeted:
On the Save the Kids scandal, Joel said he had no knowledge of the project until its launch day, when he apparently reached out to Faze Kay, asked him a few questions then invested. Joel claims he panicked when he saw others dumping the token and followed suit, ‘to avoid losing money’.
“I had no idea this dump was going to occur, I had no involvement with the project besides having invested money into it. If I had of known that it was going to be dumped right away then I would not have invested, however by the time I’d realised it was too late,” he said in this statement on Medium.
“I’m incredibly sorry for everyone who lost out on this and I was wrong to invest in the project. I was also not aware there was supposed to be an anti-whale dumping protocol.”
On selling over half of his own $XCAD token, Joel said a wallet screenshot showing he sold 2,000 XCADs ‘only showed the sell orders’, and that he had bought roughly twice the amount of tokens that he sold, with a wallet that started with 0 XCADs and holds 1,936 now.
He added: “I am now completely aware of how wrong I was to be trading my own token, I was mostly using profits from farms to accumulate more. I was not fully aware of how wrong it is to buy your own token, this is a huge mistake, although the other founder of XCAD has a wealth of experience in crypto, I do not have as much, and did not realise this was so wrong. I am extremely sorry. I will no longer be trading XCAD’s and all team tokens are locked for two years.
“The last thing I ever want to do is allow for an error from myself personally, to affect XCAD, the team, or the community. With this in mind I will be stepping down from my role at XCAD. Trading my own token is inexcusable, despite not having ill intentions, I cannot allow my mistakes to affect the project. I’m going to take some time to evaluate everything and work to be better in the future.”
Xcad – a monetisation platform and NFT marketplace for YouTubers – secured huge YouTubers Mr Beast and KSI as investors back in May 2021. It also previously raised $3.9m (£2.8m) led by blockchain technology and venture builder Zilliqa, to commence the build of its ecosystem.
Joel Morris is listed as a director for online education platform business Xcademy Limited on Companies House, however this is a different company to Xcad Network, which is based outside of the UK.
On its website, Xcademy says it ‘plans to revolutionise creator monetisation’ by creating a tokenized economy and marketplace.
In October 2019, London-based Xcademy raised €493,000 to launch its educational platform for aspiring influencers.
Xcademy then launched in December 2019 and teamed up with UK Fortnite pro Benjyfishy soon after.
Esports News UK reached out to various people associated with Xcad and Xcademy for comment.
Dom is an award-winning writer and finalist of the Esports Journalist of the Year 2023 award. He graduated from Bournemouth University with a 2:1 degree in Multi-Media Journalism in 2007.
As a long-time gamer having first picked up the NES controller in the late ’80s, he has written for a range of publications including GamesTM, Nintendo Official Magazine, industry publication MCV and others. He worked as head of content for the British Esports Federation up until February 2021, when he stepped back to work full-time on Esports News UK and offer esports consultancy and freelance services. Note: Dom still produces the British Esports newsletter on a freelance basis, so our coverage of British Esports is always kept simple – usually just covering the occasional press release – because of this conflict of interest.
